Back to School Resource Guide
Back to School Resource Guide
5 Myths About Happiness
This article is part of the 5 Myths series.
Myth #1: God is unhappy.
In an art museum in the beautiful Tuscan city of Siena, there hangs a 500-year-old oil painting that captures nearly everything that is wrong with our view of God.
It was painted in 1513 by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi and entitled the “Trinity Triptych.”1 In the center is a picture of the Trinity at the crucifixion with the Father holding the cross on which Christ is hanging, and the Holy Spirit perched as a dove on top of it. Jesus is dead: head bowed, hands nailed, eyes closed. The Spirit is so small, static, and impersonal that you might initially not even notice him. And the Father is, frankly, terrifying, with an austere countenance and fierce scowl that remind you of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. If this visual depiction is anything close to the truth about God, then the idea of approaching him to ask for mercy, let alone spending eternity in his presence, is the stuff of nightmares.
Fortunately, it is not. In reality, Jesus is alive: head raised, eyes open, hands raised in triumph and prayer. The Spirit is powerful, joyful, and life-giving, just as divine and personal as the Father and the Son, and is blowing wherever he wills as he fills the world with love and peace. The Father is smiling and singing, not scowling and staring, and his arms are outstretched because he is embracing the world with forgiveness in Christ, welcoming us to himself. There is nothing and nobody in the universe who is happier than the triune God.
Consider the way Jesus talks about God in his parables and elsewhere. Once there was a king who threw a wedding banquet and wouldn’t let it start until all the places had been filled (Luke 14:12–24). Once there was a man who found his sheep that had wandered off; he went home rejoicing and invited everyone in the village to rejoice along with him (Luke 15:1–7). Once there was a woman who found a lost coin and invited everyone to rejoice with her as well (Luke 15:8–10). Once there was a vineyard owner who was so generous to his laziest staff that it drove everybody else crazy (Matt. 20:1–16). Once there was a father whose son returned from a far-off country. He celebrated with a hug, a kiss, new clothes, a feast, music, dancing, and an insistence that everybody had to celebrate and be glad (Luke 15:11–32). Once there was a master who gave lots of money to his servants, and when they used it well, he invited them to “come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matt. 25:21). (Things did not go so well, however, for the people who turned down the wedding invitation because they had more important things to do, or for those who chose to sit outside the party sulking, or for the servant who was afraid of his master because he was a “hard man.” Domenico Beccafumi, take note.)
Happiness
Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wilson uniquely weaves multiple approaches to explore 6 important questions about happiness. He combines practical wisdom with a rich study of our deepest longing—a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Myth #2: “Happiness” is quite different from “joy.”
There is a vocal evangelical tradition of distinguishing joy (deep, serious, lasting) from happiness (light, trivial, fleeting). I have always found this slightly odd. If I were to claim that weddings were really occasions of joy, as opposed to happiness, you would probably be puzzled, and rightly so. And the distinction disappears altogether when you think about other European languages: the English say, “Happy birthday,” while the French say, “Joyeux anniversaire,” the Spanish say, “Feliz cumpleaños,” and the Greeks use “Charoumena genethliac” (chara is the word for joy in the Greek New Testament).
More importantly, there is no real basis for this distinction in the Scriptures. “Happiness,” “gladness,” “joy,” “pleasure,” and “delight” can be used interchangeably. To be “happy” is to “rejoice” (1 Kings 4:20). To have “fullness of joy” is to experience “pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). So there is no need to believe that happiness is flippant or that real joy is so deep as to be invisible.
Having said that, I think people who teach that there is a difference are trying to make an important distinction, even if separating happiness from joy is not the best way of making it. It is a distinction of degree, not of kind, and it is the difference between the shallow and deep forms of happiness, pleasure, delight, and joy. Ancient Greek writers made a related distinction between the deep well-being they called eudaimonia (thriving, flourishing) and the fleeting pleasure they called hedonia, from which we get our word “hedonism.”
That, I think, is what people are trying to say when they draw a sharp distinction between happiness and joy. Personally, I think that is an unhelpful (and unbiblical) way of saying it—not least because Scripture talks about enjoying, delighting in, rejoicing before, being gladdened by, being happy in, and taking pleasure in God, who is the deepest source of happiness there is. But nobody can deny that the distinction between shallow and deep forms of happiness—and our ability to experience one without the other—is a common human experience. Most of us would also recognize that the deep version knocks the shallow version into a cocked hat.
Myth #3: Happiness is a choice.
Picture the search for happiness as a game of cards.
Every card game contains three elements. You are dealt a particular hand, over which you have no control. You make choices about which cards to play and when, over which you have near-total control. And there are certain conditions you have to operate within, which may change as the game progresses (following suit, playing a higher card than the one before, trumping, matching the stake, or whatever it is). You are not in control of these conditions, but you may be able to influence or anticipate them at certain points in the game.
It is the same with happiness. From a genetic point of view, all of us are dealt a particular hand in life that we cannot change. Twin studies suggest that we each have a happiness baseline, or set range, to which we will naturally default. Research shows that identical twins report extremely similar levels of happiness, even if they are raised apart and have had very different experiences. We know that genetics and brain chemistry play a significant role (although by no means the only role) in cases of clinical depression and that some of us will need some combination of medical, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic help if we are to flourish. In other words, some people are born with a cheerful disposition by nature, and others are naturally more melancholic. If you think about your friends and family, this will probably be obvious.
But this is by no means the whole story. The conditions we experience and the choices we make have powerful effects as well, which is why people can become more or less happy as their life progresses, why some generations (like ours) are more prone to depression than others, and why even identical twins can experience different levels of enjoyment from one another. A naturally melancholic person can become significantly happier by developing their character, relationships, and spirituality. Similarly, a naturally sunny person can become miserable through bad habits like comparing themselves with others, withdrawing from community, nursing grievances, and yielding to addictions. The hand we are dealt is the beginning of the game, not the end.
There is nothing and nobody in the universe who is happier than the triune God.
Myth #4: Happiness comes from running away.
The location of joy is primarily about presence, not absence. Happy places have to do with who or what is there rather than who or what is not there.
Many people today see things the other way round. Happiness is found by removing the sources of sadness. You achieve peace by resolving conflict; you find wellness by banishing anxiety; you experience bliss by taking away stress; you have a holiday by stopping work; you reach nirvana, enlightenment, or paradise by banishing suffering, ignorance, or the body. Joy is located where certain things are not. Even the language we use to describe happy places and experiences—“vacation,” “retreat,” “break,” “hideaway,” “escape,” “getting away from it all”—reveals the extent to which we see the location of happiness in essentially negative terms.
There is a place for this, of course. When creation is renewed at the end of the biblical story, the new heavens and new earth are described with a series of delightful denials as a place with no more tears, no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, no more thirst, and no more evil (Rev. 21:1–8). But crucially, the reason that those things are not there is that God himself is there, wiping away the tears and remaking the world. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man,” says the one seated on the throne. “He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3). The absence of grief is grounded in the presence of God.
In the same way, joy in this world is located wherever God is present, in Christ by his Spirit, rather than wherever painful things are absent. It could be in a Galilean boat as it is battered by the waves; it could be in the sorrow and confusion of an upper room farewell, in the injustice of a Jerusalem kangaroo court, or in the stocks of a Philippian jail; it could be in the isolation of exile on the island of Patmos. As sad as the circumstances may be, if God is present, joy is available. Even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are accompanied and comforted by our ever-present shepherd, who protects us with his rod and staff and greets us with tables of abundance, overflowing cups of gladness, and promises of dwelling in his house forever (Ps. 23:3–6). Joy is found through presence, not just absence. We find happiness by running toward, not running away.
Myth #5: This life is as happy as it gets.
The best is yet to come. That is the teaching of Scripture. Jesus tells us that we are currently in the pains and griefs of childbirth but that soon our anguish will be over; the new life for which we have been waiting will be here, and nobody will be able to take our joy away from us (John 16:20–22). For the moment, we are troubled by light and momentary afflictions, but Paul says they are achieving for us a weight of glory beyond all comparison (2 Cor. 4:17). In the final book of the Bible, at the renewal of the heavens and the earth, John celebrates the abolition of everything that would restrict our happiness anywhere, ever. God, he says, “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
This is of paramount importance for the Christian. It means that world history is ultimately a comedy rather than a tragedy. It ends with a feast, a wedding, and everyone living happily ever after, rather than with a disaster, a funeral, and fade to black. Life is shaped like a smile (down in the middle but then up at the end) rather than like a frown (up in the middle but then down at the end), as my friend Glen Scrivener describes it. And that has huge implications for our lives in the present. Instead of cramming in all the experiences and distractions we can before time, age, and mortality consign us to endless nothingness—as we are urged to by advertisers, bucket listers, and books like 1000 Places to See Before You Die—we can endure any sufferings we face as the painful but necessary prologue to eternal delight. This life is not the high point of the tragic frown; it is the low point of the comic smile. It is the pain of childbirth before the euphoria of new life.
Notes:
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Domenico_Beccafumi_-_Trinity_%28detail%29_-_WGA01534.jpg
Andrew Wilson is the author of Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever.
Popular Articles in This Series
View All
5 Myths about Angels and Demons
Sadly, there is a lot of confusion about angels and demons and certain myths that simply won’t die. Here are five of them.
In all the areas of theology where Calvin made his most distinguishing contributions, we see the exaltation of the work of the Spirit driving his analysis.
People are susceptible to believing all sorts of misconceptions about the purposes and practices of marriage.
Depression can be quite as fiery a trial as any other. The good news is that God does indeed hear the cry of the afflicted.
